There are certain issues with certain people’s opinions of certain works. Consequently I’m going to push the details of what this post is about exactly beyond the fold, but not beyond the pale.
The only thing I know about Carl von Clausewitz is that he said “war is the continuation of politics by other means”. He also said “the best form of defence is attack”, “the enemy of a good plan is the dream of a perfect plan” and “to secure peace is to prepare for war”. However, this post is not about von Clausewitz. It’s about two fairly famous related works, one based on the other, both fairly thoroughly misunderstood and one also unfairly dissed: ‘Starship Troopers’.
Up front I’m going to say that I disagree strongly with the political philosophy of Heinlein’s novel although I do have quite a bit of sympathy with the idea. As for the film, something terrible seems to have happened to its reputation, and bearing in mind that Verhoeven is also reponsible for ‘Robocop’, also quite misunderstood, and ‘Total Recall’, it’s fairly obvious that if you think he meant for it to be a pro-totalitarian or pro-Fascist film, you’ve got it completely wrong. There’s also the issue of identifying what Heinlein intended with Fascism or even totalitarianism and whether it’s a thought experiment or direct advocacy for his political beliefs. The whole thing is a bit complicated really.
Just to introduce the two then:
Robert A Heinlein is a front-ranking English language science fiction writers of the mid-twentieth century CE along with the politically very different Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke. Among other things, he wrote military science fiction, and I’ve found everything I’ve read by him to be very readable and a page-turner. However, I haven’t read much of his work because he has a reputation for being right wing. Asimov is a liberal and was even invited to join the Communist Party, which he turned down. Arthur C Clarke has a religious bent and was heavily influenced by Stapledon, and is of course British. Heinlein supported the Vietnam War, although he also ran for office as a Democrat as a young man. He’s influenced, as are many other SF writers, by his experience of the Second World War. He served in the Navy during the previous decade and as an engineer in the War itself. Like many other people, he drifted to the Right as he got older but unlike some others, he was always politically active, from his Democratic years in the 1930s at least up to 1959’s ‘Starship Troopers’. He believed very much in military government. However, weirdly, his ‘Stranger In A Strange Land’ was very popular with hippies and the counterculture, and he regarded himself as a libertarian who was close to being anarchist. He has a beguiling talent for making his worldbuilding seem believable and reasonable to the reader. I have a sneaking admiration for his work even though his politics are in some ways very distant from my own. He’s also very character-centred and “human”. A better word borrowed from this century’s parlance might be neurotypical.
‘Starship Troopers’ is one of a series of his works driven by a political perspective, and it’s arguable whether it’s his or not. He may simply be setting up an idea and seeing how it works through the plot as a thought experiment, but my impression is that he takes it pretty seriously and I think it probably is what he actually believes. I’m not familiar enough with his writing or life to say too much from an informed perspective. I’ve read ‘I Will Fear No Evil’ and ‘The Door Into Summer’, ‘Beyond This Horizon’, ‘The Number Of The Beast’ and I’m not sure what else. The first is actually quite a strong influence on my view of the nature of personal identity, so there we have it, a right wing author forms a plank of one of my most fundamental philosophical stances which has a major influence on my life and those of the people around me. That novel is the reason I disagree with Derek Parfit’s views. He’s considered the most important and seminal writer of genre SF, establishing many of the central tropes of what outsiders tend to think of as science fiction. Heinlein’s heroes tend to balance the physical and the mental in that they don’t shrink from using violence but are also powerfully intellectual. Being close to pacifism, I hope I don’t need to state that I disagree strongly with the specifics here but also consider one of the major virtues of Yoga that it does the same, though very differently.
‘Starship Troopers’ is influential in two different ways. As well as its political theory, it was a factor in the establishment of the Mecha subgenre of Anime, although Gerry Anderson is also an influence here. Besides that, I would say it promoted military SF, although in a way that’s part of the same thing. The powered exoskeleton, a wearable machine that enables one to exert greater strength than one would alone, already existed before 1959, the year the novel was published, but would probably not have been so widely adopted without his work, for better or worse. But today I want to talk about the other influence.
I get the impression I’ve mentioned this before on this blog, so forgive me if I’m repeating myself (apparently I am to some extent). The basic premise of the novel is that in order to vote, one must serve in the military for at least two years, and violence is seen as a legitimate solution to problems. The reason for this is that liberalism ruined society and it was basically scientifically established that violence had a rightful place in human affairs. It’s probably obvious that I completely disagree with this but at the same time I find his views and the way he illustrates and argues for them fascinating. The novel is partly a propaganda piece defending the Cold War and using the aliens as a symbol for Red China, but it goes deeper than that. Heinlein clearly maintains that there is something central to human nature which makes it impossible for Communism to work, and that for us, a species for which Communism would work would seem utterly abhorrent and a threat. It’s like our instinctive dislike for insects is linked to an innate repulsion to socialism. And that’s interesting, because apparently research has shown that Right wing people make a stronger connection between disgust and moral judgement than Left wing people. I would disagree with this to some extent because I think there are different ways to be Right wing and some of them have nothing to do with prejudice against marginalised groups, at least consciously, and to say they have subconsciously is to presume to know the minds of the people with these views better than they know themselves, which is quite an arrogant position unlikely to lead to empathy and therefore any kind of helpful dialogue. It is nonetheless interesting that Heinlein makes this equation.
I’m not interested in defending a slave-owning democracy. That said, the democratic nature of ancient Athens meant that the people voting for or against war were doing so in the full knowledge that it would be their own lives on the line if they chose to pursue a belligerent policy. This is no longer the case in Western democracies. Nowadays, people who join the military are unlikely to get anywhere near the levers of power unless they’re already privileged. There was a time when the monarch led their troops into battle, but this seemed to end because of the risk to a particularly valued member of society, and at a time when the fate of millions was tied up in that individual’s fate it did make sense to stop doing this, regardless of the wisdom of having such a social order exist in the first place. If that’s a given, it is a rational decision, but it means that the choice of life and death can be made without personal risk. This is the central issue in the novel. In order to earn the right to vote, one must be prepared to put one’s life on the line to defend the body politic.
It’s also light years away from my political beliefs, but precisely because it’s so radically different, the questions asked are in the same realm as my own. My personal belief is that political obligation cannot be derived legitimately but is instead imposed by force, by a government holding a monopoly on the threat of violence. We’re born in territories claimed by governments which most people have never freely consented, because there is no way of opting out without severe personal cost in financial or other terms. There is no hospitable place to which one can move in order to avoid the coercion of government. There are the high seas, Antarctica and war zones, and that’s probably it for this planet. Of course, one reason those places are inhospitable is that there’s no state or other organisation making them more habitable, but when that happens, there are strings attached. It’s a valid argument to say that your life depends on the state, because for example one might be born in a hospital run by the government, go through schooling provided by it, be protected from the threat of violence by a police force and eat food brought to you by road and rail built by them. There’s also the question of compromise, because the chances are nobody will agree with you politically 100%, so you have to comply with the law of the land even if you weren’t a member of the party which brought a particular law into being and would never vote for them. The law also often coincides with morality. I don’t actually think it would be okay to kill or steal, or for that matter drive dangerously, which in my case actually means driving in any way at all. Nevertheless, there is no other choice, and the absence of that choice means that the only ultimate reason to obey the law is that it’s enforced by potential violence and loss of freedom, and in some countries loss of life.
Heinlein poses the right question but gives the wrong answer. His answer is diametrically opposed to mine. He has one of his protagonists express the opinion that violence is often the answer, which I disagree with, but I agree with his opinion that exercising the franchise is in a sense a form of violence. I do vote. In doing so, I’m not entirely pacifist (and incidentally therefore not entirely vegan, which is close to pacifism) because I am engaging in action which endorses the state’s monopoly on violence. Heinlein, amazingly, has got this absolutely right. Of course, the alternative of not voting is irresponsible and the powers that be can sometimes be very keen on the idea of people not voting and therefore it may be in their interests to encourage cynicism about politicians as public servants, because that way one loses the ability to discriminate between better and worse politicians and the actual point of having a democracy, such as it is. However, I’m not completely pacifist anyway because I honestly believe violence was the only way Nazism could be defeated and I don’t want to impose my values as a privileged White Westerner on other, more heavily oppressed people whose experience has led them to conclude that armed insurrection is the only effective answer. After all, it doesn’t actually make their violence less legitimate than that of the armed forces, and there’s moral complexity in both.
Heinlein’s system works in detail like this: you are not born destined to have the right to vote. At the age of eighteen, everyone of sound mind can make the free choice to serve in the armed forces for at least two years, during which they have no freedom. If war breaks out during this period, this is extended for the duration of the conflict. Even a blind paraplegic can serve, although it would be hard to find tasks for which they’re suited. Because of the wide range of abilities, the government has had to provide some kind of work, usually dangerous and unpleasant but always necessary, for every potential citizen. Once one’s term of service is over, provided you haven’t been killed, you not only have the right to vote but the obligation to do so unless you break the criminal law. However, any interruption of service will permanently lose you the opportunity even if you sign up again.#
Now, this has been compared to fascism, and the absence of possible other forms of service which can’t be integrated with the armed forces is ignored. It means that a pacifist has no right to vote, which to Heinlein’s mind is entirely fine because a pacifist doesn’t have the defence of a democratic government as their highest principle. Of course it isn’t actually fine and it assumes that every member of society benefits enough from the social order to defend it. To be fair, the society in question is depicted as having no racism or sexism as Heinlein understands it, although of course this is to the mind of a White male American living in the mid-twentieth century and in fact there are sexist and racist elements in the book as written. In some situations, women are seen as more suitable for particular front line rôles in the military, such as spaceship pilots, because they’re more able to stand the G forces involved and are usually smaller than men, but they also need to be good at maths to do this, and again there’s no suggestion that they wouldn’t be just as capable as men. Racism is seen as small-minded and excessively focussed on local concerns. I mean, he does try, and his society is in fact one where ethnicity and gender are not barriers to success or enfranchisement so this could be fair given his assumptions. Whether it’s possible to get there from here is another question.
Non-citizens are not considered intellectually or morally inferior. These are people who can’t vote because they have not done military service. They do, however, pay tax, so this is taxation without representation. That said, being a taxpayer does give one some rights as to how the government spends one’s money and you can be wealthy and entrepreneurial, and have high status without also having the right to vote. Non-citizens may regard involvement in politics as a dirty business they don’t want to be involved in, and this is quite a common attitude in liberal democracies generally. The government and armed forces don’t encourage people to join up. If anything, they discourage them. They’re given forty-eight hours leave as a cooling off period immediately and many of them never bother coming back, which bars them forever from citizenship. They place severely injured ex-combatants as recruiting officers in order to demonstrate the potential price of service. Future citizens absolutely go into this with their eyes open, so to speak, and it’s very much a free choice.
This is also very much a society in which veterans are respected, which contrasts starkly with our own. There aren’t likely to be any homeless vets here, for example. Not only is a very large component of adult society ex-forces, as was the case with men in the post-war era probably somewhat formative in Heinlein’s thought in preparing the novel, but also they’re generally fairly respected, except for the fact that politics is considered by many non-citizens as getting one’s hands dirty and therefore not particularly worthy of respect. Also in this society there are as many female veterans as male, so there is less balance there among those who can vote. The brutalising effect of being trained to kill and the tendency to make irrational decisions in the heat of the moment which then become set in stone because of the high price paid for them, such as the death of one’s friends or one’s own serious injury. People who haven’t been through this psychologically damaging experience have no say in how the world is run.
On the other hand, Paul Addison’s ‘The Road To 1945’ made the case for the Second World War causing the rise of the welfare state and the NHS. Rico, in the novel, is from a rich background but is treated just the same as everyone else, and it’s been claimed that the mixing of people from different social strata led to a fuller appreciation on the part of the more privileged of the lot of the lower orders. There was also more trust in giant publicly-funded projects. One thing I’m interested in but haven’t looked into yet is whether there’s a connection between the large governmentally-organised hospitals and public servant healthcare workers who must have existed at the time, and the establishment of the NHS. Maybe a society run entirely by veterans would have this aspect to it as well. It led to a historic Labour victory.
This society, then, doesn’t seem fascist. Even so, the implicit attitude to pacifism does come close. One’s supreme duty is seen as being to the state, which is the simple definition of fascism I feel most drawn to, although I admit that’s because it’s simple and not because it’s accurate. But as far as I know we don’t get to find out if it’s pluralist or not. It’s possible that there are no longer political parties because government aims at unity of purpose, which means in a sense that it’s a one party state. We do, however, know that it isn’t Communist, because the Pseudo-arachnids are portrayed as Communist and suited to it, and there are clearly private big business ventures. Pseudo-arachnids are contrasted with humans. They are portrayed as a perfectly communist society and were a stand-in for the Maoist Chinese government and possibly people in the book, except that in reality Heinlein seems to have seen Communism as unsuitable for the kind of organism which human beings are, so if anything Pseudo-arachnids are more Communist than any human group could ever be. The novel also has the Skinnies, humanoids in league with them initially but possibly through mind control rather than willingly and who switch sides later on.
The Bugs are not like us. The Pseudo-Arachnids aren’t even like spiders. They are arthropods who happen to look like . . . a giant, inteliigent spider, but their organization, psychological and economic, is more like that of ants or termites: they are communal entities, the ultimate dictatorship of the hive. Every time we killed a thousand Bugs at a cost of one M.I. it was a net victory for the Bugs. We were learning, expensively, just how efficient a total communism can be when used by a people actually adapted to it by evolution; the Bug commissars didn’t care any more about expending soldiers than we cared about expending ammo.
Hence Heinlein, or at least Juan Rico, believes that humans are not adapted to thrive under a communist system. As an ex-Stalinist, I can remember sympathising with Stalin’s idea that it was worth sacrificing a whole generation of the human race for utopia, but I don’t believe that he was trying to do that. That is, I’m sure he was persecuting a generation of the Soviet peoples (plural) but not for the sake of utopia in the long term.
The Pseudo-Arachnids (I’m not calling them “bugs”) have certain features which makes it “okay” to be speciesist against them. I’m pretty sure Heinlein is on record as saying that we will find that there are intelligent life forms in the Universe whom it’s practically our duty to exterminate because they will be essentially inimical to the human race. Making something look and behave like a giant arthropod stimulates the human disgust instinct as expressed in Torah with its list of treyf animals (but for locusts, probably because they eat all the crops so we may as well eat them). If you start with a real human target for racism and use it for propaganda purposes to distract and divide the populace, you have to impose negative stereotypes on a pre-existing set of individuals, and it’s therefore important to prevent people from getting to know them and realising they aren’t as they’re portrayed or a mass of individuals, but the Pseudo-Arachnids are carte blanche. Heinlein can write whatever he wants about them and they plainly are the “yellow peril”. But this presumably means that back in the twentieth century, in his real world, he can see that Communism isn’t working for them because they’re human and have the same proclivities and instincts as WASPs. For the purposes of the novel we can be confident that Red China could not endure because of human nature, which not only prevents Communism from functioning properly but also leads to its downfall. This is actually quite historically deterministic, which is a fixation of Marxism. For the Federation, history does have a direction and a scientific basis. It just doesn’t go in the direction of Communism.
There is plenty more to say about the novel, but its influence means that it’s also worth moving on. It’s said to be responsible for the Mecha (メカ) subgenre of anime, also known as ロボットアニメ (robotto anime) such as Neon Genesis Evangelion, and of course it also has a manga version. Indigenous Mecha pre-dates ‘Starship Troopers’ by a couple of decades, but was clearly influenced by both ‘Thunderbirds’ and the novel. There is, for example, an OVA mecha anime based on it called 宇宙の戦士 – Uchuu no Senshi – ‘Warriors of the Universe’. There’s also a board game released in 1976 and re-released as a tie-in to the film, a tabletop game, possibly an RPG, and of course the film and its apparently execrable sequels, a TV series and a 21st century video game. The only one of these I’m familiar with is the first film. I don’t want to judge the sequels without watching them but I also don’t want to watch them. The first sequel has a rating of 3.6 on IMDb, which isn’t encouraging, but of course everyone else can be wrong. I suspect what they’ve done with the sequels is cash in on the misinterpretation. I also think there’s a myth established that when the first film came out, it was misinterpreted as pro-fascist. This didn’t happen in my recollection, and I think I’m going to have to address this before anything else.
2020s fans of the film seem to make the claim that it was initially seen as almost fascist propaganda and a bit brain-dead. This, I think, is a kind of superiority thing we get nowadays where, to quote Professor Frink of ‘The Simpsons’, “No you can’t play with it! You won’t enjoy it on as many levels as I do.”. This is pretty sucky, and doesn’t reflect how it was actually received at the time. When it was first released, it was seen in the context of other Vehoeven films such as ‘Robocop’ and ‘Total Recall’. They all have a kind of grey clunky look to them, which I don’t think is merely due to contemporary influence. His films do seem to have a tendency to be misunderstood though. They’re kind of brainy action films. ‘Robocop’ is about the dehumanisation brought on by masculinity, rampant capitalism and corporate power. ‘Total Recall’ is about identity, capitalism and the nature of reality. There are other films of his I haven’t seen with more sexual themes and I don’t know about those but ‘Starship Troopers’ is in the same vein as the two just mentioned. Verhoeven has said that a major theme is that “war makes fascists of us all”. That was also how it was understood by many viewers at the time, though not all.
In a sense, the film isn’t so much about Heinlein’s philosophy as expressed in his novel as the circumstances likely to give rise to belief in such an ideology, or perhaps the result of a society run along those lines. It basically makes you root for fascists, then confronts you with the fact that it’s done so and gets you to ask yourself why. It brings out one’s inner fascist and criticises her. Several interludes in the film take the form of propaganda films modelled after ‘Triumph des Willens’ and ‘Why We Fight’. Like the novel, it’s a Bildungsroman, or rather a coming of age film in this case, following several teens out of high school, all of whom enroll in the forces and pursue their careers very successfully. Verhoeven only read something like the first two chapters of the book, so some people argue that it can’t be a real adaptation. It’s also been compared to ‘Full Metal Jacket’.
One of the major influential innovations in the novel, the powered armour, is completely absent from the film. There are many other differences, but there would probably have to be because the novel is a lot more cerebral. The film definitely goes for deliberate corniness. The initial flashforward is to the barren Pseudo-arachnid homeworld Klendathu rather than an urban Skinny environment. The mobile infantry are lower-tech. Carl is not psychic but is an electronics genius. Dizzy is female and doesn’t get killed in the first chapter. This actually changes things quite a bit as in the book the women are pilots, not ground forces. Rasczak survives well into the second half of the film rather than having died in the backstory and is merged with the teacher character Dubois. The film Johnny Rico is from Buenos Aires along with his family and both his parents get killed in an asteroid impact, along with the rest of the population of the city, giving Rico, Dizzy, Carmen and the rest a major personal grudge against the Pseudo-arachnids. In the novel, Juan’s father joins up because his wife was killed in the attack on Buenos Aires and Rico ends up as his commanding officer. The Pseudo-arachnids are generally less intelligent although there is a more intelligent caste.
It feels to me very strongly that in the film, the asteroid strike on Buenos Aires is a false flag operation to start an aggressive war against the Pseudo-arachnids. Klendathu is on the opposite side of the Galaxy to Earth so the asteroid would have to travel 80 000 light years to get to us, leaving ample opportunity for interception, and it doesn’t make sense that the asteroid would be sent from their system rather than be perturbed in this one to hit Earth. The attack on Klendathu, I also suspect, was deliberately lost. They engineered an attack on the home world in order to guarantee three hundred thousand deaths and provoke the human race into hatred and xenophobia. But maybe not. Maybe the government simply underestimates the abilities of the aliens due to its own xenophobia.
The young and central characters are all pretty people and we’re made to care about them. This establishes a deliberately superficial æsthetic contrast between them and the Pseudo-arachnids, so there’s an implicit criticism of the audience’s prejudice. What appear to be tactical shortcomings in the film may not be. There’s a planetary asteroid defence system which is not used against the asteroid which destroys Buenos Aires. The news report is deliberately gory. The Federation clearly doesn’t want the war to end. However, the society itself is remarkably egalitarian. The new Sky Marshall (i.e. Federation president) is a Black woman, there’s a mix of ethnicities who are clearly equally treated and the mix of women and men in the military and society is clearly not gender-based, less so in fact than in the novel. Violence between humans is considered normal and acceptable. There are public executions. Perhaps one of the interesting differences in the film is the emphasis on media manipulation.
Social Darwinism is a theme. One of the catchphrases is a quote from a real soldier in the book:
Come on you apes! Do you want to live forever?
– Unknown platoon sergeant, 1918.
The battle wipes out less suitable soldiers and the upper ranks of the military carry out their own eugenics by using live ammo in training exercises and shooting cowards in the battlefield. The centrality of the heterosexual romantic relationships is also about breeding in the long run. A parenthood licence is also mentioned, which is a bit strange since Rico’s parents are non-citizens.
It’s never clear what one should do when one produces a cultural artifact which is open to being taken in a way which conflicts with one’s values. One doesn’t want to talk down to one’s audience, viewership or readership, and Verhoeven doesn’t, but the result is that it has tended to be taken in a way which is opposite to his beliefs. Two other films seem to stick out as fitting into that category quite easily. There’s ‘V For Vendetta’, which seems to be taken as a rallying cry by Conservatives, and an older film, ‘They Live’, which is taken by neo-Nazis as an allegory for a Jewish conspiracy to run the world. It’s difficult to know what to do with these takes. In some cases, they might expose common ground between different political perspectives. It’s like the film is an equation which different variables can be plugged into, but perhaps the misinterpretation of ‘Starship Troopers’ is more about being overtaken by the propaganda-influenced direction than seeing it as a metaphor for different political views.
By forcing us to inhabit the minds of what is arguably fascist, both works probably help us understand one’s enemy, and that kind of empathy is in short supply right now. Consequently, Heinlein’s and Verhoeven’s talents are universally useful and could help us to have a more mutually respectful dialogue about things which matter deeply to us. Therefore, I don’t think it’s going too far to say that both the novel and the film achieve a kind of universality which makes them great and they escape from the prejudices of the author and director. At one point in the film, the Sky Marshall says that we must understand the Pseudo-arachnids in order to destroy them. Maybe we should forget about the second bit and just do the first.
A Box Of Chocolates 